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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Zelaya should not be reinstated!

I emailed the following to President Barack Obama, Senators LeMieux and Nelson, and Rep. Bill Young:

I think it is necessary once again to point out that Manuel Zelaya, the ousted former president of Honduras, is not the constitutional head of state or of government of that nation ever since the Supreme Court of Honduras, with the full support of the Congress and other branches of government, issued a warrant for his arrest for violating the Constitution, attempting to hold extralegal elections, stealing government funds, inciting a riot, and other charges.

Neither the United States, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the European Union, or other entities outside of the borders of Honduras have any right to arbitrate constitutional issues within Honduras any more than a foreign state or organization would, in, say, deciding that the U.S. Constitutional procedure for impeaching a President should be vetted with any of them first. That's imperialism!

The only legal bodies that have the authority to decide whether Mel Zelaya should have continued in office or not are the very ones that ousted him. They had the legal authority and they exercised it. The analogue to their procedure is called impeachment in the United States. It's no more a coup than the ouster of Richard Nixon was one, and this Zelaya makes Nixon look like a choirboy with a halo when you actually look at what he was getting away with.

I seriously and deeply question the judgment of any government or leader that supports the reinstatement of an impeached official who has violated the Constitution of his or her country, and whose next stop should be before the legal body his nation's Constitution has empowered to render a verdict on his impeachment. Let Honduras settle her own affairs before any more bad precedents are set by this administration, lest they end by boomeranging back to our own nest!